[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Friday, November 1st, 2024
- Foundations of Project Management
- Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project
- Project Planning: Putting It All Together
- Project Execution: Running the Project
- Agile Project Management
- Capstone: Applying Project Management in the Real World
- The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
- The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
- The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
- Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
- Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
- Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
- The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
- The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
- Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
- Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
- Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
- Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
- Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
- Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
| Time | Event |
| 4:14a | Launch Your Project Management Career with Google’s AI-Enhanced Professional Certificate
?si=TMflasoogRfSD14h Back in 2021, Google released a series of certificate programs, including one focused on Project Management. Designed to give students “an immersive understanding of the practices and skills needed to succeed in an entry-level project management role,” the certificate program features six courses overall, including: More than 1.7 million people have since enrolled in the course sequence. And Google has now updated the courses with 6 new videos on how to use AI in project management. The videos will teach students how to boost project management skills with AI, identify potential project risks with gen AI, use AI to improve project communications, and more. The Project Management program takes about six months to complete (assuming you put in 10 hours per week), and it should cost about $300 in total. Following a 7‑day free trial, students will be charged $49 per month until they complete the program. All Google career courses are hosted on the Coursera platform. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that anyone who enrolls in this certificate before November 30, 2024 will get access to Google AI Essentials at no cost. Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture. |
| 8:00a | How the Influential Time-Travel Movie La Jetée Was Made (Almost) Entirely out of Still Photographs
In a future where humanity has been driven underground by an apocalyptic event, a prisoner is haunted by the childhood memory of seeing a man gunned down at an airport. A group of scientists make him their time-traveling guinea pig, hoping that he’ll be able to find a way to restore the society they once knew. In one of his forced journeys into the past, he falls for a strangely familiar-looking woman who convinces him not to return to his own time period. Alas, things go wrong, culminating in the final realization that the death he had witnessed so long ago was, in fact, his own. You may recognize this as the plot of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, from 1995, and also as the plot of Chris Marker’s La Jeteé, from 1962. 12 Monkeys, a full-scale Hollywood picture starring the likes of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, attained critical acclaim and box-office success. But La Jeteé, which inspired it, stands as the more impressive cinematic achievement, despite — or perhaps owing to — its being a black-and-white short composed almost entirely of still photographs. That unusual (and unusually effective) form is the subject of the new video above from Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter. “When you think about it, Terry Gilliam is using still images too,” says Puschak. “It’s just that he’s using 24 still images every second, while Marker uses, on average, one image every four seconds.” In La Jeteé, we’re “forced to sit with every frame,” and thus to notice that “they’re dead: all movement is gone, and we’re left with these lifeless fragments of time, an appropriate thing in a world obliterated by war.” Marker “shows us that the movement of moving pictures, even though it resembles life, is illusory; it’s really just another form of memory, and memory is always fragmentary and lifeless, re-animated only by the meaning we impose on it from the present.” Yet this photo-roman, as Marker calls it, does contain one moving image, which depicts the lady with whom the protagonist gets involved waking up on one of their mornings together. Puschak describes it as “in the running for the most poignant bit of motion in all of cinema” and interprets it as saying that “love, human connection somehow transcends, somehow escapes the trap of time. It may be cliché to say that, but there is nothing cliché about the way Marker shows it.” Marker’s inventive nouvelle vague colleague Jean-Luc Godard once called cinema “truth 24 times per second” — a definition broken wide open, characteristically, by Marker himself. Related content: How Chris Marker’s Radical Sci-Fi Film La Jetée Changed the Life of Cyberpunk Prophet William Gibson Petite Planète: Discover Chris Marker’s Influential 1950s Travel Photobook Series A Concise Breakdown of How Time Travel Works in Popular Movies, Books & TV Shows Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
|
| 9:00a | Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism
Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expression fascist pig, writes Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” “used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits.” In the forties, on the other hand, the fight against fascism was a “moral duty for every good American.” (And every good Englishman and French partisan, he might have added.) Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fascist regime, which “was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” It did, however, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” The dark humor of the comment indicates a critical consensus about fascism. As a form of extreme nationalism, it ultimately takes on the contours of whatever national culture produces it. It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many different cultural manifestations of authoritarianism, across Europe and even South America. Italy may have been “the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country,” and got to name the political system. But Eco is perplexed “why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements.” For one thing, he writes, fascism was “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” One detail of Eco’s essay that often goes unremarked is his characterization of the Italian opposition movement’s unlikely coalitions. The Resistance included Communists who “exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property,” and leaders like Eco’s childhood hero Franchi, “so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups.” This itself may be a specific feature of an Italian resistance, one not observable across the number of nations that have resisted totalitarian governments. As for the seeming total lack of common interest between these parties, Eco simply says, “Who cares?… Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.” Read Eco’s essay at The New York Review of Books. There he elaborates on each element of fascism at greater length. And support NYRB by becoming a subscriber. Note: This post originally appeared on our site in 2014. Related Content: George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940) Walter Benjamin Explains How Fascism Uses Mass Media to Turn Politics Into Spectacle (1935) |
| << Previous Day |
2024/11/01 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |